Waiting for the Lady

The Lady is Aung San Suu Kyi, the democratically elected leader of Burma who’s never been allowed to hold power. The military junta that has ruled the troubled country since 1962 has limited her contact with the outside world especially after she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Now, in 2002, she is given qualified release from house arrest. Sloan Walcott is determined to meet her. He has something to deliver. Part-time smuggler, part-time art dealer and full-time rogue, Wolcott is a prominent resident of Bangkok’s notorious expat community. The promise of quick money draws him to the Burmese capital, a city under siege from within. There he comes into possession of a camera belonging to a Japanese newspaper reporter killed in a suspicious car crash. The camera is loaded. Inside is one image of Suu Kyi riding in an automobile with a bullet hole in the rear window as reminder of the government-organized mob that attacked her in 1996. Another shows a seductive young woman with a singular tattoo. The dead journalist’s father makes Wolcott promise to deliver the first photograph to Suu Kyi personally and cautions him not to become obsessed with the figure in the other one. The pledge proves difficult to keep and the warning difficult to heed. Waiting for the Lady is a vivid novel of political and personal intrigue that draws on today’s news and the author’s fabled knowledge of the region. It is full of passion and heartache, laced with an intimate understanding of Southeast Asia’s human and physical geography. Its descriptions of Rangoon and of the Burmese countryside far to the north call to mind George Orwell and Graham Greene. What they did for their times, Christopher G. Moore does for ours.